Well, it’s fan­tas­tic to be in this com­pa­ny. For those of you who came in sort of on the sec­ond twenty‐year wave, we just looked back at the orig­i­nal peo­ple— People are amazed at the growth of the Web, but the growth of the Internet, that was actu­al­ly what hap­pened from zero. So the things that you guys have done from this have been the way that we have learned. So we have learned how to build some­thing dis­trib­uted, hope­ful­ly. How to build some­thing which has got the stuff on the out­side rather than the mid­dle. But also how to build stan­dards groups and stan­dards orga­ni­za­tions, and how to close down work­ing groups, we learned under some cas­es.

So I’ve got in this room many men­tors. Ben at CERN was the guy who actu­al­ly tried to per­suade folks at CERN that the Internet was in fact a good idea and not some­thing to be attacked fero­cious­ly and thrown out in favor of ISO stan­dards, and who worked on under­cov­er to get var­i­ous of us who were inter­est­ed in the Internet work­ing togeth­er. So, Ben was actu­al­ly sort of a men­tor at the time of my putting togeth­er the Web. After that, peo­ple have been men­tors about how to build the Web to be a plat­form on which oth­er peo­ple could build, just as the Internet was a plat­form on which I could build. Things like that.

And I just in fact came from our nth (for some val­ue of n) web con­fer­ence in Lyon, where I tried to explain in my keynote how the fun­da­men­tal prop­er­ties that the Web has should now be car­ried on by the peo­ple who’ve got more ener­gy to go danc­ing around on stage giv­ing keynotes these days.

So, there are oth­er waves com­ing on. They’re build­ing on top of the Web, they’re build­ing on top of the open Web plat­form and so on, but hope­ful­ly they’re all build­ing using the same fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples. Not only about how we build stuff, but also about how we work togeth­er, about the decen­tral­ized and open and car­ing, also, com­mu­ni­ty that you guys have set up, we have tried to set up, and I hope they will set up in time. Thank you.

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